A horizontal reclining figure in blue pencil, the body viewed from a slightly elevated side angle. The composition extends from the left — where a foot and lower leg are indicated — through the central torso to the right, where the upper arm and shoulder fade into the page. The cool blue pencil line describes the body's outer contours with characteristic precision.
The most striking formal element is a dense, heavily cross-hatched rounded form at the center-left of the composition — the hip or raised knee rendered through such concentrated parallel-line buildup that it becomes nearly geometric, a hemisphere constructed from accumulated mark-making rather than described by contour. This is an unusual move in Sidney's figure drawing practice: a zone of the body transformed by the act of drawing into something approaching abstraction.
The rest of the figure contrasts with this concentrated center: the contour lines elsewhere are clean and spare, the blue pencil used for its clarity and coolness. The hatched hemisphere reads as an interruption — a formal event within an otherwise linear vocabulary — suggesting either an extended hold that allowed deep observation of that particular form, or a deliberate formal experiment.
This crossing of the figurative and the near-abstract in a single work anticipates the formal concerns of the paintings, where the body dissolves into pattern. The blue pencil series, which has produced some of the most formally distinctive drawings in the collection, here pushes furthest into formal territory.